Bridging the Gap Between AI Skepticism and Virtual Nursing Interest
As AI and virtual nursing become integral to healthcare, skepticism among nurses remains. Many fear job displacement and increased workloads, making it crucial to address these concerns head-on.
Involving Nurses in Development
Engaging nurses in the design and implementation of virtual nursing can foster ownership and reduce skepticism. Creating advisory teams allows frontline staff to voice what they want AI to manage, humanizing the technology and making it more acceptable.
Highlighting Success Stories
Consistently sharing positive outcomes from AI initiatives can demonstrate its benefits. When nurses see tangible improvements, such as enhanced patient safety and reduced workloads, they’re more likely to embrace the technology as a supportive tool.
Focusing on Quality Care
It’s essential to frame AI as a means to enhance patient outcomes rather than simply boost productivity. By emphasizing that the goal is to improve quality of care and safety, nursing leaders can shift perceptions and build trust in the technology.
By involving nurses, sharing successes, and focusing on quality care, healthcare organizations can create an environment where AI is viewed as a valuable ally rather than a threat, ultimately enhancing patient care.
Listen to Holly Lorenz, Narinder Singh, and Tiffany Wyatt discuss virtual nursing interest vs AI skepticism.
Video Transcript
Tiffany Wyatt:
So Holly, it’s so great that you’re excited about AI and SMI, and we also know that the whole industry is excited about AI and virtual nursing, but there has been skepticism from many nurses on AI and particularly because it’s perceived as a way to maybe increase ratio or take over their jobs or as you alluded to it, taking away their decision making. How do you think about that concern and what would you do to alleviate that?
Holly Lorenz:
Well, it is real. We do know that, and I think it is exposing nurses to what you’re trying to achieve using, again, a short video or a core team that’s going on a site visit that sees what’s happening at hospitals that have implemented this and getting feedback from people who have worked with it before. There’s nothing better than someone in your department, your unit or a hospital that has already had experience with virtual nursing to be a good supporter. I also think that it is really important to build virtual nursing with the voice of the nurse. They’re much less skeptical of what it is if they’ve been able to design the implementation as well as what are the key clinical things or visual things that you really want AI to do for you, and then sharing success stories open every meeting with the success that you’ve had with the virtual nursing experience, making sure that you’re sharing the impact of it because nurses want to make an impact, and if AI is helping them do that, then they’re going to adapt it much easier and we just need to tell the success stories time and time again.
Tiffany Wyatt:
It’s such a good point, and I think I’m hearing throughout this whole discussion that bringing the nurses in and really starting with them, and I think that goes with AI as well, and being a nurse myself, I understand where they’re coming from and I also agree with you that just education on AI and getting a little more familiar with it, and that is exactly involving them, so I think that’s huge. I want to start,
Holly Lorenz:
I’m sorry, it can’t be a stick. It needs to be a carrot.
Narinder Singh:
Even Holly, you started this webinar with a point that I think is really relevant here, which is if we can do things like help nurses be safer in the rooms with ai, which we absolutely can by giving them the ability to communicate and by just watching for them like, Hey, we can tell people are yelling in this room and being able to provide an additional set of eyes on that patient so that they’re not exposed in a dangerous situation. Those are great examples of where it’s a real asset to the bedside versus it’s just something that you’re doing to me to change my job. I think that’s a wonderful example of how we can make it more tangible. But I do want to pull to the dark side of this for a second, which is nurses have seen a lot of technology and people say, oh, no, no, it’s great.
It’s going to make you more productive. And you’re like, yeah, it did make me more productive, but then you piled on a bunch of more work, you changed the number. If you were A CNO today and you’re like, Hey, starting to see value out of virtual nursing, and you’re like, no, no, the answer is not to now add more work. The answer is to use that to create longer term value levers like throughput and patient care metrics. How do you make sure as a nursing leader that it ends up that way versus, hey, this is looked at as just another stick that we start with a carrot and we end up with a stick.
Holly Lorenz:
I think you have to be very careful in not selling it in how many minutes nurses say it because then when you save it, someone wants to take it away and then give you something else back or take away a caregiver. You have to sell it as a way of one being more proactive because in any time in healthcare, we can be more proactive. Generally speaking, the outcomes are better, the patient becomes more well in a shorter timeframe, there isn’t as many complications. And so the savings then begin is I believe we need to have more peer reviewed studies on what’s the impact of length of stay with virtual nursing because I don’t think we need to have that a little more science related to that. I am certain there’s the outcomes, but really starting to do some peer reviewed literature in this way of which here’s how virtual nursing has helped our patients or the operations or the nursing workload without feeling we need to substitute that or change the staffing pattern because we saved an eight hours of time that day. So it can’t be an arithmetic approach. It really needs to be a quality of care approach.